Come December, it’s traditional in the industry to meditate on emerging trends and make predictions about how these will shape the year to come. I have my fair share of prognostications for 2021, but I want to take this moment to reflect on a year that could never have been predicted.

When I ruminate on 2020, I land again and again on one word: resilience. As an organization, Puppet pivoted to remote work in the second week of March and never looked back. Every individual at Puppet demonstrated remarkable adaptability as their home became their workspace and the concept of integrating work and home life took on new meaning. We, along with the rest of the world, were thrown wholesale into a river and had to learn how to swim or risk drifting downstream.

The amazing news? We’re all swimmers now.

I’m so proud of the way every single person at Puppet showed up for one another and their communities, embraced remote collaboration, created new systems to ensure the business succeeded, and found a new way to foster the Puppet culture we cherish. I’m proud, but I’m not surprised.

Building a Digital Community

The technology we build every day enables flexibility and generates resilience, and so too our company transformed to support our employees’ health and safety, while ensuring the business continues to flourish. Not only did we step up to support our employees with virtual office hours and enhanced communication, we expanded access to the Puppet Support Portal for all users and customers, upleveled engagement with our community on Slack, and moved our workshops and trainings online.

Speaking of events, we relaunched Puppet Camps for the first time since 2016 to cultivate collaboration within the community and share best practices across our user base. These virtual events served as a nexus for the Puppet ecosystem, and I encourage you to check out the playlists for Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, UK & Ireland, and America Central, East, and West. We also held our first-ever Federal Government Puppet Camp to bolster our federal, civilian, state and local government community of partners and practitioners. This event also enabled us to introduce the FIPS Compatible release of Puppet Enterprise.

In November, we hosted our first digital Puppetize and saw the highest registration ever for this fantastic conference. (Be sure to check out the recap of Puppetize on the blog.) I was so inspired by the talks given by several Puppet customers that highlighted the ways in which Puppet enabled them to transform and flourish in spite of the pandemic. It is so fulfilling to see the real impact our technology makes on the lives and companies of the people who use it. Check out these talks from our customers Athenahealth, NatWestGroup, University of Oregon, Walmart, and Willis Towers Watson.

Cloud, compliance and content

Our customers are the reason for Puppet. In the conversations that Abby, Deepak and I have with our customers, we learn from the source what will help make them more successful. This year, we launched multiple products and services to enhance our customers’ experience as they migrate deeper into the cloud. In June, we released the public beta of Relay which connects dozens of cloud platforms, tools, and APIs that developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs have managed manually in the past. In September, we partnered with Replicated whose KOTS (Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf) platform gives Puppet a way to deliver, scale and operationalize Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise, as a cloud-native solution for scaling DevOps automation and practices across an organization.

As our customers tango with more cloud and hybrid environments, the need for compliance and security has never been higher. In May, we announced our new CIS compliance service to help our customers enhance their security profiles and better equip them to pass audits quickly and easily, and this month, we launched Puppet Comply, which provides customers with the required assessment capabilities through the product in addition to the CIS compliance service.

In addition to cloud and compliance, we focused on the need for integration and the rise of DevOps practices. In September, we announced new Windows services, integrations and enhancements aimed at making it easier to automate and manage infrastructure using tools Windows admins rely on day in and day out. Our 2020 State of DevOps Report found a correlation between self-service platforms and DevOps success. The findings show that establishing a platform approach to software delivery helps organizations standardize and scale DevOps practices across more application development teams.